We’ve all heard the advice: when choosing a sport, pick one that will
help keep you in shape throughout your adult life. Get yourself a set
of golf clubs or a tennis racket. Take up running or biking.

But speed skating?

Doug Learned

"If you have an itch to do something," Zimmer says, "try it."

Maura Zimmer ’91 started competitive speed skating at the age of
forty-two. Now that might not be that much of a surprise for a woman
who had been a longtime hockey player. Both sports, after all, are
played wearing skates, on ice, in a rink. You might expect Zimmer to
enjoy zipping around the ice as a way to keep her legs strong and her
heart and lungs in good shape as her peak competitive years recede
safely into the sunset.

But two years after starting in the sport she was national champion in
her age group. “That is a great thing that I have learned from this
whole process,” Zimmer says. “When I was younger, I thought people who
were talented athletes had God-given talent or not. As an adult I have
learned that with desire and hard work you can achieve a lot.”

Why take up speed skating? Boredom. “I was bored with what I knew how
to do in the gym,” she says. She had always worked hard at becoming a
better hockey skater and had recently been working with a strength
coach. As part of her workouts, she’d undergone several tests to
measure her strength and speed: “I was surprised at how well I did.”

She was also ready to break free of the whole team thing. “I wanted to
do an individual sport,” she says, “and I wanted one with an objective
measure of success. With racing, you have a measure of speed and lap
time, and you see where you fit in with the big picture.” She adds, “I
still wanted something competitive.”

In 2012 Zimmer worked her way up to the U.S. National Short Track
Championship. “It was my first season of competing,” she says, “and I
knew I had a chance at it based on the times. But I also knew that
everything had to go my way at the meet.”

Success in speed skating depends on achieving the fastest speed you can
control. Lose just a whisker of that control and a skater will catch an
edge or be disqualified for interfering with another skater while
trying to pass. At the 2012 championship, however, everything fell into
place for Zimmer, and she won all four of her races, tallying enough
overall points to win the gold medal for women in the
forty-to-forty-nine age group.

She returned to the nationals in 2013 to defend her title, but while
she was passing a skater in the first race their skates made contact
and Zimmer was disqualified. “In 2012,” she says, “I was nervous, but
that gave me energy. In 2013 I was nervous, and it sucked the life out
of me. I fell.” In the process she damaged an edge on one skate and was
unable to get it properly resharpened during the tournament. Still, she
came away with a silver medal.

“While you definitely don’t train for the silver,” Zimmer says, “I felt
as if finishing that meet and getting on the podium were an exercise in
mental toughness.”

A few weeks later, Zimmer competed in the Master’s International Short
Track Championships. More relaxed, she posted faster times, but the
competition was better, and so she narrowly missed a spot on the
podium. To make matters worse, she sustained a concussion in the last
race. Having had several concussions during her hockey days, she knew
to take her recovery seriously.

“To succeed in a race,” Zimmer reiterates, “you have to push yourself
to the edge, and you might feel like you are a little bit out of
control. I felt a little cautious during the 2014 season because I
didn’t want to get another concussion.”

Now that she’s recovered, she’s back to preparing for the 2015
nationals. “I feel like I have unfinished business,” Zimmer says. “I
feel like I have the potential to finish first again, but what bothers
me is that I feel like I didn’t skate well the last time I went.”

Barring another concussion, Zimmer hopes to keep competing for as long
as she can. And she has a message for the rest of us aging weekend
warriors.

“I see people in our age group talk themselves out of doing something,”
she says. “The easy excuse is ‘I am too old. All my good days have
passed, and I can’t learn anything else or ever change as a person.’

“That is what I wish people would take away from my story: if you have
an itch to do something, try it. A lot of the benefit is in the
experience and the process, even if you never get to the top of the
mountain. There are so many good things along the way.”

Comments (1)

10/20/15

Go Maura! So pleased to hear of your continued success. Best to you from your old neighbor in Harvard! - J

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